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THE TONGUES OF MAN 


UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 


HOW THE WORLD GREW UP 

The Story of Anthropology 

RACES OF MEN 

The Story of Ethnology 

HOW THE WORLD SUPPORTS MAN 

The Story of Human Geography 

MAN AND HIS RECORDS 

The Story of Writing 

MAN AND HIS CUSTOMS 

The Story of Folkways 

HOW THE WORLD IS RULED 

The Story of Government 

MAN AND HIS RICHES 

The Story of Economics 

HOW THE WORLD LIVES 

The Story of Sociology 


Thomas S. Rockwell Company 
Publishers 
CHICAGO 








Publishers’ Note 


This book presents in popular form the 
present state of science. It has been reviewed 
by a specialist in this field of knowledge. An 
excerpt from his review follows: 


“It has been a great pleasure to read 
this charming little book on human speech. 
The writer has taken a difficult and un¬ 
avoidably technical subject and has se¬ 
lected just those features and made just 
those emphases which bring it within the 
easy comprehension of the young. No 
boy or girl within the ages of ten to 
fourteen can take up this book and fail 
to be seized by the excitement of discov¬ 
ering unexpected novelties in a subject 
generally thought of as close to dry, if 
not actually dry? 


Signed: Edward Sapir 

Sterling Professor of Ethnology and 
Linguistics, Institute of Human 
Relations—Yale University. 









The robins■* screams serve to frighten the cat 





























TONGUES of MAN 


By 

Elizabeth LeMay Hayes 

n 

Drawings by 
Ben Stahl 




THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 


CHICAGO 



Copyright, 1931, by 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 1 
CHICAGO 


Printed in the United States of America 

, ^ 

©CU 405»2 

AUG -3 1931 / 


CONTENTS 


I Man’s First Speech 11 

Who invented speech? Do animals have a form 
of speech? How can you tell what their calls 
mean? What are some early forms of speech? 

Do words sound like their meanings? How did 
the Indians talk? How did man first talk? 

II How Language Spread Over the World 18 

Has there always been more than one language? 

What changes took place? What was the result 
of man's wandering? What happened when man 
settled in one place? 

III Three Great Language Families 26 

Are there many languages? What languages do 
white men speak? Where did the Indo-Europeans 
come from? What languages are like their 
tongue? What family did the Germanic peoples 
come from? Who first spoke the Semitic tongue? 

IV Some Other Great Language Families 38 

What other tongue was there? What is the 
practice of “borrowing” words? How does 
Chinese differ from our language? Which lan¬ 
guage uses “clicks?” Are Indian languages simple 
in form? 

V The Early Speech of England 47 

Who were the first people in England? Is the 
Celtic language still spoken? What happened 
when the Romans came to England? What did 
they leave behind them? What happened when 
new tribes came to England? Who brought the 
alphabet to England? What happened in the 
ninth century? What were the Normans like? 


58 


VI How English Grew Up 

Why did not French become the language of 
England? What gradually happened? Did the 
French language affect English? Can you under¬ 
stand Chaucer*s English? How was English 
spoken in Shakespeare*s time? Why has our 
spoken language changed? Are the same spellings 
always pronounced the same? Do we use many 
Latin words? Why was Latin used so much in 
the Middle Ages? Why are German and English 
somewhat alike? Do adopted words become 
real English? 

VII Our Changing Speech 75 

Do words change their meanings? What words 
have changed in form? How does language 
change? Can we ,f coin** words? What changes 
or adds to meanings of words? Do some words 
have queer changes? What words come from 
the Greeks? How are other words brought into 
English? 

VIII Something About “Slang” 89 

What are a visiting** words? What are collo¬ 
quialisms? Are slang words harmful to language? 

What happens when slang is used too much? 

Does slang ever become good English? What is 
figurative language? What gives slang its bad 
reputation? 

IX The Speech of Tomorrow 97 

When is language likely to change rapidly? Do 
we need similar languages today? What is 
Esperanto? Does language tend to become 
simpler? How has the verb (< had** changed? Has 
English become rich in words? Is English a 
powerful tongue? 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


The robins’ screams frighten the cat (frontispiece) 

Monkeys have differences in their way of chatter 13 
These wandering groups must have met many new 
things 21 

Several languages have almost the same word for 
“cattle” 28 

The Aryans established the caste-system 34 

For many centuries the Chinese have been civilized 41 
The Romans built lines of forts across Britain 49 

The Norsemen brought many new words to England 55 
“He rood upon a rouncy, as he 1(outhe” 63 

Great scientists, li\e Newton, wrote in Latin 72 

New ideas often bring new words and change the old 76 
A “persona” was a mas\ worn by an actor 83 

Newspapers contain many figurative words 95 

Changes have been going on in the Romance languages 103 
We have many words that will describe a storm 108 



Chapter I 


MAN’S FIRST SPEECH 

M AN learned to use his tongue, his lips, and 
the vocal cords in his throat for speech 
so very long ago that no one now knows how 
it all began. But this much is certain: speech 
was not invented in a day nor even in a cen¬ 
tury. And no one man was its inventor. In 
one sense, speech is as old as man. 

As a matter of fact, man did not even invent 
the use of sounds for expressing feelings and 
wants, and for communicating with others of 
his kind. But he did perfect their use to ex¬ 
press complex meanings, as no other creature 
has ever been able to do. 

Birds and animals, for instance, have some 
of the elements of language. A flock of spar¬ 
rows quarreling over a crust of bread can make 
their feelings very clear. It is easy to tell the 


Who invented 
speech? 


11 


12 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Do animals 
have a form 
of speech? 


difference between the bark of a playful dog 
and the bark of an angry watchdog that knows 
his business and means to see to it. You can 
read a squirrel’s whole nature in his busy chat- 
terings. So far as language is simply an ex¬ 
pression of feeling, all these creatures and many 
more may be said to have language. 

Animals can even make simple wants known 
and cooperate with one another by means of 
sounds. When a mother cat is looking for her 
kittens, her mewing means very plainly, 
“Where are you? Come here!” This is not 
saying that mew, as a word, means any more 
to the cat than it does to you. It is the way in 
which the cat “says” it that matters. Again, 
when a dog scratches on the outside of the 
screen-door with his paw, and whines, both the 
movement of his paw and the tone of the 
sound he makes mean very plainly, “Please 
let me in! ” He is trying to express a want. 

There is a song that robins sing when it rains, 
or when they think it is going to rain. The 
robins’ song is not speech, but it does show a 


MAN’S FIRST SPEECH 


13 


close connection between sound and meaning. 

If a cat appears in the neighborhood of a 
pair of robins’ nest when the young birds are 
learning to fly, he becomes the object of such 
cries of rage and anger as you will seldom hear 
a bird utter. The robins’ screams serve to 
frighten the cat, as well as to impress the young 
birds with the danger connected with cats. In 
fact, all the other birds near-by, hearing the 
other robins’ cries, join in the uproar. These 
particular sounds are so generally used by robins 
and other small birds to mean “Cat! Danger! ” 
that if you hear the outcry you will be pretty 
sure to find a cat lurking around. 

If you become acquainted with the monkeys 
in the zoo, you will realize that if you were a 
monkey you would understand their gibberings | 
very plainly. You may even learn to recognize 
certain differences in the way they chatter, v ' 
much like the difference between the bark of 
the playful dog and that of the suspicious watch¬ 
dog, or between the mewing of a kitten that 
is merely tired and one that is pitifully hungry. 


Monkeys have cer¬ 
tain differences in the 
way they chatter 


How can we 
tell what their 
calls mean? 



14 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What are some 
early forms of 
speech? 


The first human speech must have slowly 
grown out of just such slight but important dif¬ 
ferences. 

Certain sounds come to us more easily, under 
special conditions, than others. Laughter does 
not always sound like “ha! ha!,” but it is fre¬ 
quently something very much like that in 
sound. Cries of pain are usually “ow! ” or “oh” 
or “oo.” Many of the earliest words in human 
speech were natural cries expressing how the 
person making them felt. 

So, too, just as the dog scratches at the door 
he wants opened, so early man must have eked 
out his few words with many gestures. The 
imitation of the cry of a bird or animal is a 
sort of sound-gesture, to give an idea of what 
the creature meant, if there is none in sight to 
point to. Many of the earliest words were 
probably imitations of other sounds in nature. 

Because man’s mouth and tongue and vocal 
cords are of a different shape and size from those 
of the creatures he tried to imitate, his imita¬ 
tions were not always very good, and the oftener 


MAN’S FIRST SPEECH 


15 


and the more carelessly he made the sound, the 
less it was like the original. It is much easier 
to say “bow-wow” than it is to bark. Even to¬ 
day, little children will speak of a dog as a 
bow-wow . 

Numerous words in our language today are 
clearly imitative of sounds in nature, such as 
bang, boom, cuckoo, hiss, sizzle, murmur, whis¬ 
per, and so on. One can easily see how strange 
it would be if bang meant “whisper.” 

But these emotional and imitative words 
make up only a small fraction of the words in 
a complex language. In the great majority of 
our words there is no relation between sound 
and sense, and this is true of other languages, 
too. Tree in English, arbre in French, and 
baum in German, though utterly different in 
sound, all mean exactly the same thing. 

Such sounds in no way suggest the nature 
of the things that they name. Their meaning 
depends entirely upon custom, and has to be 
taught by one generation to the next. On the 
other hand, imitative words suggest themselves 


Do words sound 
li\e their 
meanings? 


16 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How did the 
Indians tal\? 


so naturally that we often find similar words 
in lauguages spoken by people who are sepa¬ 
rated by great distances, and who are quite 
unacquainted with each other. Thus the word 
1{a\a, which means “crow,” and is an imitation 
of that bird’s harsh cry, is used by the Hindus 
in Asia and by the American Indians of Van¬ 
couver Island. 

Pure gesture, by movements of the hands 
and body, doubtless played a very important 
part in the development of language. It is sur¬ 
prising how much conversation can be carried 
on by means of gesture alone. In the early 
days of American history the Indians and the 
white men used a gesture, or sign language, to 
a large extent in their relations with each other, 
and so did the Indians belonging to tribes that 
spoke languages so different that they could not 
understand each other’s speech. 

Just how words as symbols or signs of 
thoughts and ideas were first created and fas¬ 
tened to their meanings is something no one 
really knows. Wise scholars have disagreed 


MAN’S FIRST SPEECH 


17 


over it a great deal. Of only a few facts may 
we be fairly sure. Man did not learn to speak 
all at once. Before he used anything like real 
speech, he must have expressed himself with 
crude cries, as animals still do. His first at¬ 
tempts at speech must have been helped out 
with gestures and imitations, and around these 
a language began to be built up. 

For instance, the word spirit, which we use 
in expressing some of our highest thoughts, 
comes from the Latin word spiro, which meant 
“breathe” or “blow,” and the original word 
may have been suggested by the sound of 
breathing or blowing. 

Human speech is a marvelous invention. If 
man were not an ingenious and inventive crea¬ 
ture, forever trying something new, he might 
still be expressing himself with grunts and cries. 


How did man 
first tal\? 


Chapter II 


Has there always 
been more than 
one language? 


HOW LANGUAGE SPREAD OVER 
THE WORLD 

M AN, we are very sure, did not spring up 
all over the world at once, suddenly 
appearing in many places, as dandelions come 
out in the spring. But just as the first dande¬ 
lion plant must have developed in some one 
place, from which it spread to conquer the 
fields of the world, so man, we believe, once 
had a single country for his home. In those far¬ 
away days, he probably had only one language, 
such as it was. But we can only guess what 
man’s speech at that time may have been like. 

Man’s earliest home was somewhere in the 
Old World—just where, we do not know. His 
life was a very hard one, for he had few tools 
and weapons, and there were many fierce ani¬ 
mals against which he had to defend himself. 
But he succeeded in making himself the master 


18 


HOW LANGUAGE SPREAD OVER WORLD 19 


of his little world, and in the course of time 
he needed new fields in which to hunt—for 
man learned to hunt long before he learned 
to farm. 

So different groups of these early men, thou¬ 
sands of years ago, began to roam farther and 
farther from the old home. 

Gradually, after many generations and many 
centuries had come and gone, bands of men 
with their families had found homes in all 
the out-of-the-way places of the earth that they 
could reach, where it was possible to make a 
living for themselves. 

They built crude little boats in which they 
could cross short spaces of water. But the 
earth itself was different in those days. Some 
places that are covered by the sea now were 
dry land at that time, just as some of the places 
that are now dry land were then under the 
water. 

There was a land bridge across from Siberia 
to Alaska, where there are now forty miles of 
water called Bering Strait. This strip of land 


What changes 
too\ place? 


20 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What was the 
result of man's 
wandering? 


linked North America to Asia, and across it 
may have come some very early men into Amer¬ 
ica, though no doubt there was water to be 
crossed when the ancestors of the American 
Indians made the passage into the New World. 

Australia was brought closer to the conti¬ 
nent of Asia by a range of mountains, of which 
the tops now appear above the ocean as a string 
of islands. Thus Australia and many of the 
islands of the South Pacific were populated in 
the distant past by hardy adventurers who 
braved stretches of open sea in their small boats. 

Here again, we cannot say what sort of lan¬ 
guage men had in those early days when they 
were setting out on their wanderings. It may 
be that real language did not begin until later, 
and that it grew up in several different places. 

The wandering groups must have met many 
new things in their long roaming through 
strange lands. They would need new words 
for these things. And as people got farther and 
farther away from the old homeland, they quite 
naturally must have forgotten many words con- 



These wandering groups must have met many new 
things in their long roaming 


21 







HOW LANGUAGE SPREAD OVER WORLD 23 


neeted with their old lives, or they changed the 
meanings of the old words to fit the changed 
conditions that they found in their new sur¬ 
roundings. 

As a language is handed down from one gen¬ 
eration to another, tiny changes creep in. They 
are usually so slight that no one is aware just 
what changes are being made. But in the 
course of a few hundred years, these small 
changes may grow into very large changes. 
Bearing this fact in mind, we can easily see 
what must have happened to the speech of these 
early men during the many thousands of years 
that they were establishing themselves in new 
homes all over the world. 

These wandering tribes settled themselves 
one by one in different places that they liked. 
Having no books or other records, they quickly 
forgot all about their former homes and the 
people that they had left behind there. Grad¬ 
ually new seas, new mountain ranges of lofty 
height, and new deserts of burning sand ap¬ 
peared. Thus many tribes were cut off from 


Did mans speech 
change much? 


24 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What happened 
when men 
settled in one 
place? 


all contact with other people. It is said that 
the people of a little group of islands in the 
Indian Ocean used to think, until very recently, 
that their islands were the whole world. 

In favored countries, man learned to keep 
cattle and to raise grain. He no longer led 
the wandering life of the simple hunter search¬ 
ing for prey. He learned to build huts, to weave 
cloth, and to smelt metals. As he settled down 
into this new life, he needed more new words 
than ever before, with which to name the ever 
increasing number of new things that were 
coming into his life, and to express his thoughts 
about life and the world. 

As the language of each little separate group 
slowly changed as time went on, it became less 
and less like the languages of other groups, once 
related to it, for these other languages also were 
changing. In some cases, however, a striking 
resemblance still remains in the languages 
spoken by peoples who have long been sepa¬ 
rated from each other by great distances of 
land and water. 


HOW LANGUAGE SPREAD OVER WORLD 2S 


On the other hand, there were contacts be¬ 
tween many groups; there were wars, and 
there were invasions. A tribe might adopt the 
language of its conquerors and forget its own 
native speech; or, the conquerors might grad¬ 
ually learn the speech of their subjects and 
give up the language that they had brought 
with them. And the practice of one language 
borrowing words from another language be¬ 
gan very early. 


How did other 
changes come 
about? 


Chapter III 


Are there many 
languages? 


THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 

T HE languages and dialects (varieties of a 
language) spoken in different parts of the 
world are almost countless. Nevertheless, 
many of them may be grouped into a few large 
families. But there will still be a large number 
left out that do not seem to be related to others. 
Such is the Basque tongue, which is the lan¬ 
guage of a few thousand people living in the 
valleys of the Pyrenees between France and 
Spain. 

Another interesting fact is that a language 
sometimes does not have much or anything 
to do with the race of those speaking it. A 
people may drop its native language and learn 
to speak a very different one. This often hap¬ 
pens as a result of wars and invasions. Some¬ 
times, too, a people still continues to speak its 


26 


THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 27 


native language, although the race changes 
greatly through intermarriage. 

Thus the Turks, who now differ very little 
in appearance from their Caucasian neighbors, 
still speak their old language of the Altaic, or 
Mongolian family. The Negroes in the United 
States now all speak English, a language very 
different from the speech of their ancestors. In 
Ceylon, the large island south of India, the 
Veddas, a dark-skinned, uncivilized tribe, speak 
a language that is a distant cousin of the lan¬ 
guages spoken by European and American 
white people. 

Most of the white people of the world speak 
languages that belong to one or another of 
three great language families: first, the Indo- 
European; second, the Semitic; and third, the 
Hamitic. 

The majority of the languages of Europe, in¬ 
cluding English, belong to the Indo-European 
family. That language family, therefore, is the 
most interesting to us. It covers a wide range 
of territory in the Old World, stretching from 


What languages 
do most white 
people speaf(? 


28 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Where did the 
Indo-Europeans 
come from? 





Iceland southeastward across Europe and Asia 
to India and Ceylon, though other languages 
break through the belt here and there. 

The languages of this great speech family 
arc all descended from the language spoken 
by a very ancient people, sometimes called the 
Aryans but more properly the Indo-Europeans. 
They may have lived in western Asia, near 
the Caspian Sea, or in the region north of the 
Black Sea, in wha'c is now southern Russia. 

Although these people did not know how to 
write, and so have left no record of their lan¬ 
guage, we know something of the kind of life 
they led. We have discovered facts about their 
life by studying the words that have come down 
from their speech into languages that have long 
been spoken all over Europe and in parts of 
Asia. For instance, if several related languages 
have practically the same word for “cattle,” we 
may be very sure that the people who spoke the 
original language were familiar with cattle. 

So we know that these ancient Indo-Euro¬ 
peans kept flocks and herds, tilled the soil, and 


Several related lan- 
guages have practi¬ 
cally the same word 
for " cattle " 









THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 29 


worked in metals, that they had strong family 
ties, that they made and obeyed laws, that they 
fought in chariots, that they revered their an¬ 
cestors, and that they had a religion of nature, 
in which they worshiped the sun, the sky, the 
waters, and fire. 

Many centuries before Christ, these people 
began to wander far from their original home. 
We do not know just why; there are no rec¬ 
ords. It may have been that the land was too 
poor to support the growing numbers of the 
people; perhaps the land was becoming too dry 
to furnish pasturage; or perhaps they were 
pushed on by other peoples behind them. 

At any rate, they sent out wave after wave 
of colonists, who went into other lands, con¬ 
quering the people that they found there and 
intermarrying with them, so that their descend¬ 
ants became mixed in blood, more in some 
countries and less in others. But in time nearly 
all the peoples of these different lands learned 
to speak the language of the Indo-Europeans, 
which of course took on different changes in 


What sort of lives 
did they live? 


What languages 
are li\e their 
tongue? 


30 THE TONGUES OF MAN 

different countries, and added to itself thou¬ 
sands of new words. 

But many of the words of the original Indo- 
European language still live in languages such 
as Hindustani and Bengali in India, modern 
Persian, modern Greek, Armenian, Italian, 
Spanish, French, German, Danish, Swedish, 
Norwegian, Icelandic, Dutch, English, Gaelic, 
Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. The words 
have changed somewhat in form in the different 
languages, but the resemblance is still very strik¬ 
ing, especially in words such as those relating 
to the family, common things of daily life, and 
numbers. Take, for example, the words mean¬ 
ing “father” in some of the Indo-European lan¬ 
guages, both old and new: 


Latin 

pater 

Greek 

pater 

French 

pere 

Spanish 

padre 

German 

vater 

Old Irish 

athir 

Sanskrit (Old Hindu) 

pita 


THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 31 


Perhaps the earliest Indo-European invaders 
were the Celts, for the Celtic languages seem 
to have changed most from the original Indo- 
European speech. At one time the Celtic¬ 
speaking people occupied a large part of west¬ 
ern Europe, including practically all of the 
country that is now France, as well as the 
British Islands. Modern forms of Celtic still 
are spoken in a few places. 

Another group of Indo-Europeans wandered 
off to the region round the Baltic Sea, their de¬ 
scendants filling up the Scandinavian peninsula, 
the shores of the North Sea, and much of the 
country that is now Germany and near-by ter¬ 
ritory. Some of these people adopted a sea¬ 
faring life and became daring sailors, much 
feared by the inhabitants of other lands. Later, 
branches of this race conquered England. They 
even planted colonies in far-off Iceland and 
Greenland. Icelanders were the first Euro¬ 
peans to reach America, nearly 500 years before 
Columbus. The languages of all these people 
are called Germanic, or Teutonic, while those 


What family did 
the Germanic 
peoples come 
from? 


What became of 
the tribes that 
went southward? 


32 THE TONGUES OF MAN 

of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, 
though belonging to the same family, are called 
Scandinavian. 

Other Indo-Europeans went southward into 
the peninsula of Greece, conquering the original 
inhabitants. Their descendants built up a civil¬ 
ization of such splendor that we still study 
Plato’s philosophy and Euclid’s geometry, and 
hold Olympic games in imitation of the famous 
Greek athletic meets. The beautiful Greek 
language, much simplified, is still spoken in 
its old home, which the Greeks themselves 
called Hellas. 

Still other Indo-Europeans found their way 
down into the neighboring peninsula of Italy. 
Centuries later, the little town of Rome became 
more and more powerful and at last was mis¬ 
tress of the Mediterranean and the capitol of 
a powerful empire. The Roman Empire in¬ 
cluded the whole of the civilized western world 
of that time. 

Rome was situated in a district called Latium, 
and its language was known as Latin. The 


THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 33 


Romans imposed their language on many of the 
provinces of their great empire; and for a thou¬ 
sand years after the political power of Rome 
had faded away, Latin was still the language 
of law, religion, diplomacy, and learning all 
over Europe. 

As a result of the wars and invasions follow¬ 
ing the break-up of the Roman Empire, the 
Latin tongue in common speech began to un¬ 
dergo great changes, both in Italy and in other 
lands. By about 800 a. d., Latin, in the form 
in which it was used by the great writers and 
speakers of Rome, had started to change, as 
the language of everyday life, into modern Ital¬ 
ian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other 
languages of western and southern Europe. 

Over in southeastern Europe a similar 
change was going on. There were Roman col¬ 
onies in the country now known as Roumania 
(Romania), and their Latin speech grew into 
the modern Roumanian language, in which 
many old Latin words still flourish. 

These modern tongues are called Romance 


How was the 
Latin tongue 
changed? 


34 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Where else did 
Indo-Europeans 
settle? 


languages, because they are all variations of 
the ancient Roman speech. 

Another group of Indo-Europeans settled in 
eastern Europe. From their speech have come 
the languages of the Slavic peoples today, in¬ 
cluding the Russians, die Poles, the Czecho¬ 
slovaks, the Bulgarians, and the Yugo-Slavs. 
From still another related group comes the mod¬ 
ern Lithuanian language. 

Meanwhile, a great branch of the Indo-Euro¬ 
peans had turned their faces toward India and 
Persia. We call them the Aryans. They sepa¬ 
rated into two divisions, one of which invaded 
the rich plains of India, which were already 
thickly populated by a dark-skinned race of 
people. To keep themselves separate, the 
Aryans established the caste-system, which still 
survives in India. We know this, because their 
word for caste, which was varna , meant “color.” 
But the extent to which the Aryans mingled 
with the earlier inhabitants is shown by the 
dark skins of even the high-caste Hindus today. 

The Indo-European language of ancient In- 


The Aryans established the 
caste-system 







THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 35 


dia was Sanskrit. In its original form it is no 
longer spoken; but like Latin in Europe it has 
survived in greatly changed modern forms 
scattered over India, though some of the native 
languages are still spoken. We know what 
Sanskrit was like, because the sacred books of 
the Hindus were written in it, and we can study 
those books today. 

The other division of the Aryans went down 
into Persia, which evidently was not so thickly 
populated with dark-skinned people, because 
the Persians of today are much lighter-skinned 
than their Hindu relatives. Their ancient lan¬ 
guage still lives in changed modern forms. 

The two other great language families of 
the white race are Semitic and Hamitic. They 
show scarcely any resemblance to the Indo- 
European tongues, but some scholars think 
there may have been a relationship in the dis¬ 
tant past. In ancient times, forms of the Sem¬ 
itic language were spoken by famous peoples 
such as the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Car¬ 
thaginians, and the Jews. The chief modern 


Who first spoke 
the Semitic 
tongue? 


36 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How is Semitic 
different from 
our language? 


form of Semitic is the Arabic language, which 
the Mohammedan religion carried far and wide. 
The Abyssinian, or Ethiopic, language of Africa 
also is Semitic. 

The Semitic speech is very interesting, be¬ 
cause it is so different from ours. Its words 
are mostly formed from a certain number of 
“roots,” usually of three consonants, the vowels 
between them being changed and syllables 
called affixes added to make new meanings. 

Take, for instance, the root the idea 

which it carries being “to reign.” In the He¬ 
brew or Jewish language there are many verbs 
and nouns from this root, including: 


malak 

he reigned 

malku 

they reigned 

yimlok 

he shall reign 

timlok 

thou shalt reign 

melek 

king 

melakim 

kings 

malkenu 

our king 

malka 

queen 

mimlaka 

kingdom 


THREE GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 37 


Hamitic probably is related to Semitic. It 
was spoken by the ancient Egyptians, and forms 
of it still live among the Berber peoples of 
northern Africa. 


Chapter IV 


What other 
root tongue 
was there? 


SOME OTHER GREAT LANGUAGE 
FAMILIES 

T HERE are some groups of people in Europe 
who speak languages belonging to a mark¬ 
edly different family, called the Finno-Ugrian, 
though most of these peoples do not differ no¬ 
ticeably in appearance from their neighbors 
who speak Indo-European languages. 

The Finno-Ugrian language family includes 
Lapp, Finnish, Esthonian, Hungarian, and a 
number of less well-known tongues. These are 
distantly related to the Samoyed languages of 
northern Russia and northern Siberia. They 
are also believed to have some connection with 
the Altaic family of languages, which includes 
Tatar or Turkish, Mongolian, and the Manchu- 
Tungus languages of northeast Asia. Some 
scholars even believe that there is also a rela¬ 
tionship with the Japanese language, but this 


38 


SOME OTHER GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 39 


is very uncertain. Perhaps there exists a distant 
kinship between the Finno-Ugrian languages 
and the Indo-European. 

At any rate, we know that some of the Finno- 
Ugrian tongues have been borrowing words 
from the neighboring Indo-European lan¬ 
guages since ancient times. This is a common 
practice among languages. There is a constant 
“borrowing” going on; one language takes over 
from neighboring or even distant languages 
words that express some idea or name some¬ 
thing for which there is no corresponding word 
in that language or which is not so well ex¬ 
pressed already in the borrowing language. 
English is full of such “loan words,” as they 
are called. Even such strange languages as the 
Eskimo has given us kaya\ (a sort of canoe), 
and the Basque anchovy (a small fish), while 
the Malayo-Polynesian of the Pacific islands has 
given us taboo and tattoo. 

The Finno-Ugrian and Altaic languages are 
called agglutinative. This simply means that 
syllables are joined together to make words in 


What is the 
practice of 
“borrowing” 
words? 


40 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How does 
Chinese differ 
from our 
language? 


a way that is strange to us. First there is a 
“root,” and after it syllables called suffixes are 
added, which together give the meaning of the 
word. For instance, in Hungarian sze\ is 
“chair,” and szef^em is “my chair.” In Turkish 
sev means “to love,” and sevishdirilmediler 
means “they were not to be brought to love 
one another.” 

In southeast Asia there is another great lan¬ 
guage family that is very different from the 
Indo-European, the Semitic and Hamitic, the 
Finno-Ugrian, and the Altaic groups. This 
language family includes Chinese, Siamese, and 
Burmese. It is the tongue of hundreds of mil¬ 
lions of people. These languages are composed 
of monosyllables (one-syllable words). Every 
word is an independent single syllable, uncon¬ 
nected with other syllables. Since the number 
of monosyllables is rather limited, each one of 
them has a number of different meanings, some¬ 
times as many as nine. The exact meaning of 
a word is shown by the tone of voice in which 
it is pronounced. 



For many centuries the Chinese have been a 
highly civilized people 


41 





















SOME OTHER GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 43 


Chinese, of course, is the leading language of 
the group. This tongue, or dialects of it, is 
spoken throughout an immense and thickly 
populated territory. We might think that the 
Chinese language, because it is so simple in 
structure, is a survival of an undeveloped lan¬ 
guage of early man. But this may not be so. 
Chinese, in the distant past, may have been 
much more complex, just as English and other 
languages once were. The Chinese, for many 
centuries, have been a highly civilized people. 

Then there is still another very widespread 
language family of the Old World. This is the 
Malay, or Malayo-Polynesian, which extends 
from the Malay peninsula through the East 
Indies and out among the islands of the Pacific 
Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand. In the 
Malay form, this speech has a very complex 
grammar, but it is much simpler in the far-away 
islands, where the words are simpler, too. For 
instance, the Malays say tasi 1 { for “sea,” and 
langit for “sky,” whereas the Hawaiian and 
New Zealand natives say tai and lai . 


What is the 
Malay tongue 
like? 


44 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Which language 
uses “clicks?” 


There are two great branches of the Negro 
race: the Oceanic Negroes, who inhabit certain 
islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the African 
Negroes. But they speak very different lan¬ 
guages. In fact, the languages of the African 
Negroes are not all of the same family. A 
prominent language family of Central and 
South Africa is the Bantu, forms of which are 
spoken by many tribes. These languages make 
words in just the opposite way from the Finno- 
Ugrian and Altaic languages. They put syl¬ 
lables, called prefixes, on in front of the word- 
root. For instance, a certain tribe is known as 
the Basuto. One person is called mosuto, his 
country is lesuto, and his character is bosuto. 

In South Africa there is another interesting 
language family, the Hottentot-Bushman, 
forms of which are spoken by those two tribes. 
The peculiar thing about this speech is that it 
uses “clicks,” something like the sound that a 
coachman makes to his horses. 

The American Indians, it is now generally 
agreed, are, like the Malays and Polynesians, 


SOME OTHER GREAT LANGUAGE FAMILIES 45 


a branch of the Mongolian race. But they speak 
languages all their own. It is said that in 
North and South America there are more than 
150 separate language stocks, many as distinct 
from one another as English is from Chinese or 
Bantu. This is true even of languages spoken 
by close neighbors, such as the Iroquois and the 
Algonquians. 

The Indian languages have as complex gram¬ 
matical structure as the languages of many 
highly civilized people. Often they are pleas¬ 
ing in sound. They have, too, many abstract 
words, such as those expressing the qualities of 
persons and things. Some are “inflected” lan¬ 
guages, like Latin and Greek, and some have 
lost much of their former inflection, like En¬ 
glish. Others are more like the “agglutinative” 
languages, such as Turkish. Many of them are 
what is called “polysynthetic;” that is, a num¬ 
ber of separate meanings or ideas are passed to¬ 
gether into one word, which is often a very long 
one. Among the tribe known as the Yanas, the 
word-stem ya means “several people move.” 


Are Indian 
languages 
simple in form? 


46 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How do they 
express different 
meanings to the 
same word? 


Then they add to this many other syllables in 
order to express a thought which we might 
translate like this: “Let us, each one of us, 
move indeed to the west across the creek.” 
That whole sentence becomes one word, which 
is, in their language, ydbanaumawildjigumma - 
lia’nigi. 

Some of the Indian languages also have pitch, 
or difference of tone, like the Chinese, but the 
different tones may express either a difference 
in a word’s meaning or a difference in 
grammar. 


Chapter V 


THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 

I N THE earliest times of which we know 
anything definite about the land that we 
now call England, the people living there were 
probably of the ancient Mediterranean race, 
formerly known as the Iberians. The British 
Islands at that time were connected by land with 
the mainland of Europe. This early people in¬ 
habited all of the western part of Europe before 
the Celts, whom we mentioned a while ago, 
came in. These Mediterraneans were a rather 
small, dark-complexioned people. They cer¬ 
tainly were not civilized. We can trace them 
back to the New Stone Age, thousands of years 
ago. 

When the Celts, that western branch of the 
early Indo-European people, came to Britain 
they made it their own. We do not know what 


Who were the 
first people in 
England? 


47 


48 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Is the Celtic 
language still 
spo\en? 


sort of language the Mediterraneans spoke, for 
they forgot it when they learned to speak the 
language of their conquerors. The Basque lan¬ 
guage, which we have already mentioned, may 
be a present-day relative of it. 

The language of the early Celts still has, as 
we have noticed, a number of living forms, 
spoken in parts of Ireland, in the Scottish High¬ 
lands, in Wales, and in the northwest corner 
of France, known as Brittany. These remnants 
of the old Celtic speech differ more or less 
among themselves; they are called Irish, Gaelic 
(in Scotland), Welsh, and Breton. The people 
of Cornwall, in southwestern England, spoke 
a Celtic language until about a century and a 
half ago. Cornish is now a dead language. 

In the year 55 b. c., the great Roman general, 
Julius Caesar, conquered Britain, as we call the 
England of that time, with his well-trained 
troops. It was probably not a very difficult 
victory, for the Celtic islanders were but simple 
backwoods folk in comparison with the highly 
skilled and disciplined Roman soldiers. 


THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 


49 


Within the next hundred years, the Romans 
built lines of forts across Britain. Between these 
forts stretched smooth Roman highways, some 
of which are used as roads to this day. Around 
each important fort there arose a little town. 

For more than four hundred years, Britain 
remained a part of the great Roman Empire, 
and all these little provincial towns flourished. 
Then Rome’s fortunes changed. Rome itself 
was threatened by barbaric invaders from the 
north and east. The Roman legions (as the 
troops were called) in Britain were called back 
to Italy to help protect the threatened capitol. 

They never came back, for Rome’s power 
was rapidly fading and the empire was begin¬ 
ning to crumble. After a while, all that was 
left of Roman civilization in Britain was the 
roads and the forts. The modern Welsh lan¬ 
guage still contains numerous Latin words dat¬ 
ing from Roman times. In what is now Eng¬ 
land, however, little of the Latin speech was 
carried over into English, though we still have 
some reminders of it. 


What happened 
when the Romans 
came to England? 



The Romans built 
lines of forts 
across Britain 






50 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What did they 
leave behind 
them? 


For instance, the Latin word for “a military 
camp” is castra. To this day there are many 
English towns that have names ending in caster, 
cester, and Chester . These were once castra. 
England’s Lancasters, Worcesters, Gloucesters, 
and Rochesters bear witness to the fortified 
Roman camps that once dotted England. 

Castrum is Latin for “fort,” and castellum for 
“little fort.” From castellum to our English 
word castle is but a short cut for the tongue to 
take. Our word street comes from the Latin 
strata, meaning “a paved highway.” Our word 
port comes from the Latin portus. Wall is from 
the Latin vallum. 

When the Romans left Britain, the Celts 
missed the protection that the Romans had 
given them for some four hundred years. They 
found themselves unable to beat off the fierce 
Norsemen, or Danes, who began making raids 
upon the rich and pleasant island. Finally, the 
Celts called for help to the Germanic tribes 
living on the other side of the North Sea. 

Three of these tribes immediately answered 


THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 


51 


the call. The Angles and Saxons and Jutes 
were good warriors, and large numbers of them 
crossed into Britain. They liked the country 
so well that they stayed. And more of them 
kept coming. By the year 500 there were 
probably more Angles and Saxons and Jutes 
in England than there were Celts. For many 
years these tribes fought among themselves 
over the dividing up of the island among them. 
They pushed the Celts into the background, 
just as the latter had once pushed the Mediter¬ 
raneans. 

Now the Celts and the Germanic Angles, 
Saxons, and Jutes spoke related Indo-European 
languages. But the Celtic and Germanic lan¬ 
guages, in the course of time, had become so 
different that only a wise scholar could have dis¬ 
covered that they ever had anything to do with 
each other. The Angles, the Saxons, and the 
Jutes themselves did not speak exactly the same 
tongue; but their languages were much more 
closely related to each other than to Celtic. 

Since the Germanic-speaking people were 


What happened 
when new tribes 
came to Britain? 


52 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What Celtic 
words are still 
used? 


more numerous and more powerful than the 
Celtic-speaking people, their language quickly 
took the place of the Celtic tongue. Only a 
few Celtic words, therefore, have found their 
way into the English language. Among them 
are such words as bard, bog, brogue, dun, glen, 
lad, shamroc\, and slogan. There are other 
much less common words, such as bannoc\, a 
kind of bread; broc\, a badger; down, a hill; 
and loch, a lake. But even these did not all 
come into the language in the time of the Angles 
and Saxons; most of them, in fact, have en¬ 
tered since then. 

By the seventh century, the invaders had 
sorted out the English country pretty much 
to suit themselves. The Jutes had the south¬ 
east corner of England, called Kent; the Saxons 
had the rest of the southern part. The Angles 
occupied the northern and central part of Eng¬ 
land as well as the lowlands of Scotland. The 
Celts, however, still held Cornwall and Wales, 
the highlands of Scotland, and all of Ireland. 

Although the Christian religion and the art 


THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 


53 


of writing had come into England while the 
Celts still held the land, the Angles, the Saxons, 
and the Jutes were still pagans. They were 
practically without any writing; their priests 
and magicians, however, knew a rude alphabet 
of marks called runes, with which they used 
to carve short inscriptions on rocks. 

In the year 597, Christian missionaries from 
Rome began to come into England; mission¬ 
aries from Celtic Ireland also came. After the 
Germanic peoples of England became Chris¬ 
tians, they learned the Roman alphabet. But 
only a few persons—the priests and the monks 
—learned to write. At first they wrote only 
Latin. After a while, some of them tried to put 
their native speech into writing by means of the 
Roman alphabet. They used the Celtic script, 
which had dropped a few of the Roman letters. 
Then they added two extra letters, called wen 
and thorn , which came from the old runes. But 
these two letters died out after the coming of 
the Normans, whom we shall speak about later, 
and who introduced the full Roman alphabet. 


Who brought 
the alphabet to 
England? 


54 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Where did the 
English language 
come from? 


The first Germanic tongue which was used 
for writing in England was one of the Anglian 
dialects, and thus our language came to be called 
English. When the West Saxons got the up¬ 
per hand, their dialect became the literary lan¬ 
guage. But the name English had come to stay. 

Both of these early English tongues were 
much like the various other West Germanic 
languages that were spoken at that time. The 
Dutch language of our own day is, like English, 
a modern representative of them. 

Here is a sample of Old English, or, as it is 
sometimes called, Anglo-Saxon: 

Nis heofonrice gelic tham lige: ac this is 
landa betst. 

You can see how our language has changed 
since those days, by comparing this sentence 
with the way that it would be written in the 
English of today: 

Is not the kingdom of heaven like this flame? 
But this is the best of lands. 

In the ninth century something else hap¬ 
pened. The Norsemen, or Danes, whom the 


THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 55 



people of Britain had been trying so long to 
keep out, began settling in the northern part 
of England. The Danes spoke a Germanic What happened 
language of the Scandinavian family. It was ™ e £* r y™ th 
akin to those spoken today in Denmark, Nor¬ 
way, Sweden, and Iceland. 

As a matter of fact, the Anglo-Saxon and the 
Scandinavian tongues were so much alike that 
the English and the Danes of those days, each 
talking their own language, could understand 
each other. Some of their words were exactly 
alike; others were nearly so. 

Thus the word for “fish” was and still is fis\ 
in Danish. Fish, the Old English word, kept 
its place in our language. But Fis\ still lives 
among us as a family name. The English 
adopted many Danish words, however, while 
the Danes gave up their own tongue and learned 
English. 

Today our language contains more Scandi¬ 
navian words than many of us realize. Ta\e, 
call, care, hit, throw, ill, ugly, wrong, die, fel¬ 
low, husband, s\y, shin, wing, law, and many 


The Norsemen 
brought many 
new words to 
England 











56 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What were 
the Normans 
like? 


others of our commonest words are Scandina¬ 
vian in origin. r r . 

During the next two centuries, from the 
ninth to the eleventh, West Saxon English was 
becoming well established as the literary lan¬ 
guage of England. Then another band of 
people came in. It was the Norsemen again. 
This time, however, they were in disguise. 

These northern men—for Norse means 
“north”—were a strong, adventurous race. 
They invaded many lands. In the tenth cen¬ 
tury a body of Norsemen had seized and con¬ 
quered a fertile province in the north of France, 
which is still known as Normandy. 

Now the Norsemen—or Normans, as the 
French called them—were not nearly so civil¬ 
ized and cultured as the people they had con¬ 
quered; they were not very numerous, and they 
found themselves in the midst of a long-estab¬ 
lished civilization. They were quick and eager 
to learn, and they were far from their old home 
and kinsmen. So they learned the French lan¬ 
guage and adopted the civilization of their new 



THE EARLY SPEECH OF ENGLAND 


57 


country. It was these Normans from France, 
under their Duke William, who conquered 
England in the year io66. 

Duke William became King William I of 
England; he is often known as William the 
Conqueror. He and his nobles and followers 
brought their adopted French language with 
them into England. 

London, the capital of the kingdom, now be¬ 
came the literary center of the country. Wessex 
and its dialect lost their former importance. 
The type of English spoken in London differed 
from that of Wessex, and this fact had a far- 
reaching effect upon the future history of the 
English language. 


Did they bring 
a new language 
to England? 


Chapter VI 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


Why did not 
French become 
the language of 
England? 


I F THE British country-folk had not been 
so firmly set in their habits, the English lan¬ 
guage might have been forgotten entirely and 
French adopted in its place. But they clung to 
their own language, which by this time had be¬ 
come firmly rooted in the land. And it was 
by now a literary language, in which many 
books had been written. 

The king and his court, the nobles, the people 
of fashion, and the office-holders down to the 
least-important judge, all spoke French. But 
the common folk, throughout England, con¬ 
tinued to speak English, and they were the great 
majority of the people. Therefore, everybody 
had to know English. Even the great noble 
would have to speak English when he hired a 
cook, as would the office-holder when he went 


58 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 59 

to the cobbler to have a pair of shoes made and 
the lord when he spoke to the serfs on his land. 

From 1066 until nearly 1400, English and What gradually 
French shared England between them. As the happened? 
West Germanic peoples who first came into 
England, and later the Danes, got together and 
became English, so the Normans, too, finally 
forgot their foreign origin and became English¬ 
men, just as their ancestors had become French¬ 
men. It was easy for them to do this, because 
they were really a Germanic people and French 
was not their original language. 

About 1200, the political connection between 
France and England was broken. Before this 
time, the Kings of England had continued to 
be Dukes of Normandy in France. As the 
English ruling class ceased to follow France 
politically, they gradually lost their interest in 
French ways. It was no longer considered so 
important to know and speak the French lan¬ 
guage. Latin, which always had been the lan¬ 
guage of the Church, became also the language 
of law and of learning. 


60 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Did the French 
language affect 
English? 


Naturally, in those three hundred years, 
when the two languages shared the country be¬ 
tween them, English was much influenced by 
French. Many words from the fashionable 
tongue slipped into the common speech; so 
many, in fact, that we cannot attempt to list 
them all there. Some of them are now among 
the most familiar of our words. Aunt, uncle, 
cousin, nephew, and niece, for instance, are 
from the French. So are chair, table, dinner, 
supper, for\, roast, and boil . We would have 
a hard time carrying on business without such 
words as cost, expense, price, charge, and cash, 
all of which are of French origin. 

Sometimes, as in the case of certain business 
terms, French words were taken into English 
because there was no English word to serve the 
purpose. Sometimes a French word was more 
convenient—shorter or easier to say. Some¬ 
times, again, a newly adopted French word and 
an older English word both were kept in the 
language and gradually came to have slightly 
different meanings. 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


61 


For instance, the French word royal came 
into English in spite of the fact that it meant al¬ 
most exactly the same thing as the native word 
kingly. And as if royal and kingly were not 
enough, regal was taken from the Latin. Yet 
we are glad to have all three words today; 
they make a pleasing variety, and the language 
is that much richer. 

A curious result of French and English living 
side by side still survives in such pairs of words 
as cow-beef, sheep-mutton, calf-veal, pig-pork, 
and deer-venison. The living animals were 
tended by Anglo-Saxon cowherds, shepherds, 
swineherds, and gamekeepers. But poor people 
could seldom afford to eat meat. So when the 
flesh of these animals was served at the tables 
of the Norman nobles, it took on French names, 
which have lasted down to our own day. How 
strange it would seem to go into a meat mar¬ 
ket and ask for “pig chops!” 

By the year 1400, the English language was 
getting to be a good deal as it is today. When 
you first try to read a page from the poet 


Why are there 
two English 
words for certain 
meats? 


62 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Can you 
understand 
Chaucers 
English? 


Chaucer, who lived from 1340 to 1400, you find 
it rather strange, although much of it is fa¬ 
miliar. The spelling seems very queer, and 
many of the words are not now in use. If you 
could whisk yourself back five hundred years 
or more, you would find that the speech 
sounded as strange to our modern ears as it 
looks on the printed page. But in spite of all 
that, it would be English. 

Here are a few lines from Chaucer’s famous 
book, The Canterbury Tales . How much of 
them can you understand? 

“A Shipman was ther, wonynge fer by weste; 
For aught I woot f he was of Dcrtemouthe. 
He rood upon a rouncy, as he \outhe, 

In a gowne of faldyng to the \nee. 

A daggere hangynge on a laas hadde he 
About his ne\\e, under his arm adoun.” 

Here is how we should have to change the 
lines to make them plain to an English-speak¬ 
ing reader today: 

“A sailor was there , living far westward; 

For aught I \now, he was from Dartmouth . 



iiliiiilia 


WmM 




mjm 


»,11§ 

MMM 

Wmm&Mmlm 

\ -■•■• . < 

Umimmmmm 




* * * i «' 0*m 


“He rood upon a rouncy, as he \outhe, 
In a gowne of faldyng to the \nee” 


63 










































' 






































- 
























































































































HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


65 


He rode upon a nag , as he could, 

In a gown of coarse cloth to the \nee . 

A dagger hanging on a cord had he, 

About his nec\, down under his army 
It was not so very long ago, after all. Since 
1400 there have been only about eighteen gen¬ 
erations, from father to son. In those eighteen 
generations people never imagined that their 
children were not learning the very same lan¬ 
guage that they themselves had learned in their 
childhood. 

If we could make time run backward, we 
could go back to the days of Shakespeare, who 
lived from 1564 to 1616. That was only about 
eleven generations ago. If we could enter one 
of the London theaters where Shakespeare’s 
plays were first acted, and witness a perform¬ 
ance, our first feeling would probably be one of 
great surprise to find that the actors all spoke 
with a strong Scotch or Irish accent. That was 
the way English was spoken even in London 
in those days. In Scotland and Ireland there 
has been less change in the spoken language, 


How was English 
spoken in 
Shakespeare’s 
time? 


66 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Is it hard to 
read Shakespeare 
today? 


because the English-speaking people in those 
countries have been somewhat out of touch with 
the changing standards of English speech. 

But the English of Shakespeare does not look 
nearly so strange to us as the English of Chau¬ 
cer, although we still have trouble with some 
words that have since gone out of use, or that 
are now old-fashioned, although still sometimes 
used on special occasions. 

Here, for instance, are a few lines from 
Shakespeare’s great play, Othello . These lines 
were written over three hundred years ago; but 
as you will see, they are very plain to readers 
of today. 

“Good name in man or woman, dear my lord, 
Is the immediate jewel of their souls . 

Who steals my purse, steals trash; ’tis some¬ 
thing, nothing; 

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to 
thousands; 

But he that filches from me my good name, 
Robs me of that which not enriches him, 

And ma\es me poor indeed.” 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


67 


The ways in which some of our English 
words were formerly pronounced are shown in 
our spelling; for we have kept to the old ways 
of writing, to a very large extent, although our 
spoken language has changed. The letters gh, 
for instance, are still kept in many words in 
which they are no longer pronounced, such as 
might, nighty through, though. This sound 
gh used to be pronounced in the back of the 
mouth. It was a harsh sound, like the German 
ch in ach. It was a common sound in the Ger¬ 
manic languages. But when the Normans 
learned to speak French, which did not have 
this sound, they forgot how to pronounce it. 
Then, when they began to speak English, they 
found this sound strange, and so they dropped 
it. But in Scotland it is still pronounced, as in 
thocht (thought). 

In the same way, the \ before n in words like 
\nife and \night was once pronounced but is 
now silent. In German this \ is still pro¬ 
nounced with full force, in words such as 
\nabe (boy). This last word is the same as our 


Why has our 
spo\en language 
changed? 


68 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Are the same 
spellings always 
pronounced the 
same? 


English word \nave, which now means 
“rogue,” and in which the \ is silent. 

In these and other ways the Normans varied 
the pronunciation of English. 

If you try to pronounce such a word as 
\night according to the way it is spelled, you 
will readily see that the change has tended to 
make speaking easier. But the results have not 
always been the same. For instance, we pro¬ 
nounce ough one way in through , and quite 
another way in enough . If you should say 
“thruf” and “enoo,” no one would know what 
you were talking about. 

But if you stop to think about it, you will 
realize that through almost always comes at the 
beginning or in the middle of a sentence. The 
next word usually begins with a strong sound of 
its own, so that to pronounce the gh even as 
softly as / would be rather awkward. Noth¬ 
ing would be gained by the extra trouble. 

On the other hand, enough is very apt to 
come at the end of a sentence, as “I have 
enough.” The / sound that we put at the end 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


69 


of enough nowadays is the ghost of the old 
Germanic gh, which, in the position where a 
consonant is suitable as a closing sound, has not 
been quite forgotten. 

Throughout all the centuries, in spite of the 
addition of thousands of borrowed words, and 
the dropping of many native words, the Anglo- 
Saxon element has remained the very heart of 
the language. The commonest words that we 
use are mostly Anglo-Saxon. Man, woman, 
father, mother, brother, sister, child, food, meal, 
sleep, home, house —these are some of our fa¬ 
miliar Anglo-Saxon words. 

When Latin words have tried to invade the 
heart of our language, they have usually re¬ 
mained a little formal and cool. For instance, 
maternal comes from the Latin mater . It is a 
good word, but it does not have the deep appeal 
to our feelings that the Anglo-Saxon word 
motherly has. 

Words of Latin origin, however, form a very 
large part of our language. They came in by 
two roads. French, you remember, is a modern 


Is English 
still mainly 
Anglo-Saxon? 


70 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Do we use 
many Latin 
words? 


form of Latin. Latin words became changed 
through centuries of use in France, until 
they often were very different from the original 
Latin. For instance, the Latin word for “king” 
is rex. After the French had used the word 
for several hundred years, it became roi. It is 
easy to see, therefore, why our word royal , 
which came to us by way of French, is very dif¬ 
ferent from our word regal , which comes to 
us directly from Latin, the root of the word 
rex being reg. 

But the French form sometimes remained 
very much like the Latin. There is a Latin 
word, persona, which became in French per- 
sonne, and which in English is person. A large 
number of Latin words came into English 
through French, while many other Latin words 
came by the direct road. 

All during the Middle Ages, Latin was the 
language of the Church. There was only one 
Church (though there were many church 
buildings) in those days, and it was great and 
powerful. As there were few learned persons, 


HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 


71 


and these persons were connected with the 
Church, Latin was also the language of learn¬ 
ing. It was the international language of the 
time, as well; educated persons in all European 
countries understood it. 

While the common tongues of Europe were 
split into so many dialects that sometimes men 
living only a few miles apart could hardly un¬ 
derstand each other, written Latin continued 
the same all over Europe, so that persons who 
had learned it from books were able to speak it 
and converse with one another, though they 
may have come from different countries and 
their pronunciation of the Latin words differed 
more or less. 

The various new forms that Latin was tak¬ 
ing, as common speech, kept changing, but the 
Latin of the days of Roman greatness, preserved 
in books, remained the same. As we have seen, 
this “book Latin” (as it was called) continued 
to be used by the Church. Even today, it is still 
used in the services of the Roman Catholic 
Church all over the world. 


Why was Latin 
used so much in 
the Middle Ages? 


72 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Is Latin still 
used today? 



The practice of using Latin for very digni¬ 
fied and important purposes has lasted down 
into modern times. Queen Elizabeth spoke 
Latin fluently and effectively. Great scientists, 
like Sir Isaac Newton, who died in 1727, wrote 
their books in Latin. Wills and other legal pa¬ 
pers were phrased in it. Even today, college 
diplomas are sometimes engraved in Latin. 

Naturally this language of power and author¬ 
ity, used by the Church, by the law, and by 
learned men of all kinds, had a tremendous in¬ 
fluence upon the English language, and Latin 
words were constantly making places for them¬ 
selves in English. 

In spite of all this, English bears a very strong 
resemblance to modern German, although 
English-speaking and German-speaking people 
can no longer understand each other’s language 
without making a special study of it. The 
German word for “book” is buck ; for “friend” 
is jreund ; for “bread” is brot. These are only 
a few examples of the many German and 
English words that sound somewhat alike. But 


Great scientists, li\e Sir 
Isaac Newton, wrote 
in Latin 






HOW ENGLISH GREW UP 73 

the English did not learn these words from the 
Germans, nor the Germans from the English. 
Such words are more or less alike, because Ger¬ 
man and English come from the same ancestral 
tongue, and many of their words are word- 
cousins. 

Just as French, Portuguese, Italian, and Rou¬ 
manian are modern forms of Latin, so English, 
German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Norwegian, 
Swedish, and Icelandic are present-day varieties 
of the ancient Germanic or Teutonic language; 
but as the people who spoke that language did 
not possess the art of writing, we have no writ¬ 
ten records of their speech as we have of an¬ 
cient Latin. 

A language continues to be itself so long 
as its general structure and most of its common 
words survive, in spite of the changes that it 
undergoes with the passage of time, and how¬ 
ever much it may enrich itself with new words 
borrowed from other languages. 

Today we use countless words that have come 
into English from French, Latin, and Greek 


Why are German 
and English 
somewhat 

alike? 


74 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Do adopted 
words become 
real English? 


(especially in the sciences), and a smaller num¬ 
ber of words borrowed from Spanish, Italian, 
Portuguese, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, 
Hungarian, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and even 
Chinese, Japanese, American Indian, Polyne¬ 
sian, and other strange tongues. 

In spite of all these borrowings, we are not 
speaking anything but English. When a word 
is adopted into our language, it becomes Eng¬ 
lish, regardless of where it came from. Who 
would ever think of insisting that the word tea 
is not English but Chinese because it is from 
the Chinese te y or that candy is Arabic just be¬ 
cause it is from the Arabic word qand , mean¬ 
ing “sugar.” 


Chapter VII 


OUR CHANGING SPEECH 

I T IS as hard to say why languages change as 
to say why we change in looks as we grow 
older. We can, however, find out certain facts 
about what the changes are and how they come 
about, even if we cannot always say just why. 

Language has several different kinds of 
change. We have already noticed how it 
changes its sounds, as in \night. This is known 
as phonetic, or sound change. 

In Shakespeare’s day the word admire meant Do words change 
“wonder at” or “marvel at.” If an Englishman then me£ *™ngs? 
in 1600 said that he “admired” somebody’s 
manners, he would not mean that he found this 
person’s manners pleasing, but that his man¬ 
ners were so strange as to astonish him. The 
word is the same today, but its meaning has 
become different. This change of meaning is 


75 


76 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What words 
have changed 
in form? 



called a semantic change. Usually unknown 
to us at the time, it is always happening. 

If the plural of foot is feet, why is not the 
plural of boo\, bee1(? As a matter of fact, it 
once was that, with a difference only in the 
spelling of the written words. In Anglo-Saxon 
the words were hoc and bee, corresponding to 
jot and fet (foot and feet). But it happens that 
most of the nouns in English form the plural 
by adding an s. Somehow this habit attached 
itself to boo\ and made its plural boo\s instead 
of bee\. (Yet how funny it would sound if 
someone said “foots” for “feet!”) This is a 
change in the form or structure of a word. 

There are a number of things that help a lan¬ 
guage to change. The need of expressing new 
ideas, for instance, brings in new words and 
gives new meanings to old words. 

There is a game called “Telephone” in which 
the players sit in a row. The person at one end 
whispers a message to the player next to him. 
This player, in turn, must immediately whisper 
just what he heard, or what he thinks he heard, 


New ideas often bring new 
words and change the old 




OUR CHANGING SPEECH 


77 


to the next person. When the message reaches 
the end of the line it usually is ridiculously dif¬ 
ferent from the message as it started out. 

Something of the same kind happens in the 
history of a language. As we noticed, there 
have been only eighteen generations since Chau¬ 
cer wrote in the fourteenth century. We might 
compare these generations to eighteen players 
in the game. The language has passed from 
one player to the next, with tiny changes made 
in each transfer. The result is a language so 
greatly changed that the players at either end 
of the line in our imaginary game would hardly 
understand each other at all, if they could 
magically meet across the gulf of five centuries. 

The changes in language are not usually 
made by anyone intentionally. In fact, people 
seldom are aware that such changes are being 
made. In the game, each player believes that 
he is passing on exactly what he heard. If he 
should intentionally change the message, the 
other players would consider it unfair and prob¬ 
ably drop him out of the game. 


How does 
language 
change? 


78 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Can we “coin 
words? 


In the actual handing down of language the 
whole generation of course is the player, not 
just one person. If any one person tries to 
make changes in the language, his action usu¬ 
ally has no effect whatever. He merely sounds 
queer to those about him, and the others go 
on in their way without paying any attention to 
him. Sometimes, however, a person may 
“coin” a new word, and if the word fills a need 
and becomes popular it will be adopted into 
the language. Koda\ and chortle are recently 
coined words. 

Those who have made a study of the sounds 
of our speech and the changes that have been 
made in them tell us that the language has be¬ 
come much easier to speak during the last five 
hundred years. Our tongues, our lips, and our 
vocal cords do not have to move with so much 
effort as before. 

It is interesting to notice how the meanings 
of some words become weakened through care¬ 
less use. Take the little word very , for instance. 
It is very sad to see that this once very useful 


OUR CHANGING SPEECH 


79 


word is coming to mean very little. If you read 
that sentence over and over and leave out the 
word very every time, you will find that it means 
much the same without it as with it. Some 
people, trying to be forceful, might say “ter¬ 
ribly,” “awfully,” or “frightfully,” instead of 
“very ” 

But as you can readily guess, that is bad Eng¬ 
lish, for we do not mean what we say. There 
is really no terror, nor awe, nor fright in the 
matter. Such use of these words simply means 
that terribly, awfully, frightfully, horribly, and 
many others are often used carelessly. When 
so used, they lose much of their original force. 

Although these words are not good English 
when used in place of very , it is interesting to 
notice something that has happened in the 
German tongue. The German word for very 
is sehr . “Das ist sehr gut” means “that is very 
good.” But the word sehr once meant “pain¬ 
fully” or “sorely.” Our word very originally 
meant “truly,” coming to us, by way of the 
French, from the Latin versus , meaning “true.” 


How do some 
words lose 
their meanings? 


80 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


The natural tendency to be a little late or a 
little slow, or to put things off a while, has 
changed the meaning of other words. In An¬ 
glo-Saxon times, soon meant “immediately.” 
We now use it to mean “after a little while.” 
In the same way, when we say “in just a sec¬ 
ond,” we generally mean several minutes. 

By and by used to mean “side by side.” Two 
boys standing side by side would have been said 
to be standing by and by . From meaning near¬ 
ness in space, the phrase came to mean nearness 
in time—that is, the very next moment to this 
one. But slow people kept saying that they 
would do a thing “by and by” until now the 
phrase has scarcely any real meaning left. 

What changes or Just as some words grow feeble, other words 
a 0 d /word7? antngS § et additional meanings. Keen has several 
meanings now; it once had only one. It comes 
from the Anglo-Saxon word cene , meaning 
“bold” or “able.” It was used to describe a good 
soldier. A good soldier carried a good sword, 
and a good sword is one with a sharp edge. So 
the word came to be used for describing a good 


OUR CHANGING SPEECH 


81 


sword, and then it got a new meaning, “sharp.” 

Its old meaning, “bold,” was later lost entirely. 

But the same word, in the form of \iihn , still 
means “bold” in modern German. 

Then, too, it frequently happens in the life 
of a word, that from having a broad meaning 
it comes to have a limited meaning. For in¬ 
stance, the word grocer comes from the French 
phrase en gros , which means “wholesale.” A 
grocer, then, should be a wholesaler of all kinds 
of goods. Instead, he is now a retailer of food. 

Just as often the change has worked in the Do some words 
other direction. From having one simple h “ ve qu * er 

° 1 changesr 

meaning, a word may come to have a much 
wider, vaguer sort of meaning. For instance, 
the word pretty comes from the Anglo-Saxon 
praettig , which meant “clever” or “crafty.” 

Dear used always to mean “valued.” It has 
not entirely lost that meaning, but it is much 
more commonly used as a term of fondness or 
affection. The word precious also is sometimes 
used in the same sense. And the word fond 
once meant “foolish.” 


82 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Where did the 
word " person” 
come from? 


Words frequently travel a long way from 
their original meanings. Take the Latin word 
persona , which we mentioned before. It is 
made up of two words: per , meaning 
“through;” and sono , a verb meaning “sound.” 
A persona was a mask worn by actors on the 
stage, with an open mouth for speaking or mak¬ 
ing sounds through. From meaning a mask, 
persona came to mean the actor who wore it, 
and who represented someone in the play. It 
then came to mean anybody who represented 
anyone or anything else. In early English it 
was pronounced “parson.” We still use parson 
for a man who represents the Church. But per¬ 
son today means any human being. Who would 
ever think now that person and parson once 
meant simply a false face and an open mouth? 

Again, our increase of knowledge is all the 
time requiring new words to express new facts 
and to name new inventions. In the modern 
languages of Europe, the custom generally is 
to take certain Latin or Greek words, and form 
out of them the new words needed by science. 



A “persona” was a mas\ worn by actors on the stage 


83 














































OUR CHANGING SPEECH 


85 


The original words may be changed somewhat 
in order to make an English word that is easily 
pronounced. 

For instance, the science of botany is full of 
words formed from the Latin. Trees belonging 
to the pine family are called conifers, which 
means “cone-bearing.” 

The word photograph has been molded from 
two Greek words meaning “light” and “write.” 
When a photograph is made, the light is said 
to write on the plate or film to make the nega¬ 
tive from which the picture is printed. 

In the same way, telegraph has been formed 
from Greek words meaning “far” and “write.” 
So telegraphy is really “far writing.” In the 
same way, phonograph comes from words 
meaning “sound” and “write.” Another com¬ 
bination gives us telephone , the meaning of 
which you can now easily see. 

Sometimes we combine Greek and Latin, 
as in automobile , the first two syllables of which 
are of Greek origin and the last two of Latin 
origin. The word means “self-moving.” 


What words 
come from 
the Greeks? 


86 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What is the 
history of 
“electricity?” 


Electricity has an interesting history. It 
comes from a Greek word, electron , which 
means “amber.” The first form of electricity 
discovered by man was the kind made by rub¬ 
bing amber on woolen cloth. The Greeks were 
familiar with it. But the word electricity came 
into the English language only about three hun¬ 
dred years ago, soon after the birth of modern 
science. The ancient Greeks little dreamed 
that this mysterious force would some day be 
used to light the world at night, to pull trains 
of cars, and to carry messages and even music 
instantaneously through the air. 

Occasionally, we make names for new in¬ 
ventions from old English words, as in wireless 
and loud speaker. In England the word wire¬ 
less is also used where Americans prefer radio . 

When two languages representing different 
civilizations or cultures rub elbows together, as 
in the southwestern part of the United States, 
which once belonged to Mexico, a considerable 
exchange of words is apt to take place. Ranch, 
canyon, stampede, rodeo, broncho, coyote, som- 


OUR CHANGING SPEECH 87 

brero, pueblo, and adobe have come from Span¬ 
ish into English by this route. 

Trade and commerce also bring in new 
words. Potato, tobacco, banana, coffee, and 
tea have come into English from other lan¬ 
guages, along with the products that they name. 

So, too, other languages borrow from Eng¬ 
lish. Sport, beefsteak, and wagon are among 
the English words that have been taken over 
into French, although you might not recog¬ 
nize our old friend beefsteak in the French bif- 
tec\. 

In recent years the World War did a great 
deal in giving words new meanings, the 
“coining” of new words, and the bringing of 
words from foreign countries into the English 
language. Words had to be found for new 
war machines and new ideas. American sol¬ 
diers came back from France with French 
words which have now come into common 
usage. Some of these war-born words are: 
ace, an expert aviator; camouflage, to disguise; 
Hooverize , to save or economize; slacker, one 


How are other 
words brought 
into English? 


88 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Does language 
as a whole 
change? 


who avoids duty or responsibility, especially 
during time of war; tan 1 {, a new type of war 
machine, self-propelled, well armored and 
armed, which can travel over great obstacles, 
such as hills, trenches, and so on. 

Thus we see how language is constantly 
changing. Words come, words change, and 
words go. It is like a great living tree. New 
branches grow; some of the old ones die and 
drop off. But it remains the same tree, in spite 
of all the changes. 

So a language lives on through all the changes 
that it undergoes. Like the tree, it may divide 
into a number of limbs, with numerous smaller 
offshoots, through which the sap of the tree 
flows in fresh vigor. So even Latin is not really 
dead, nor is the Anglo-Saxon of our forefathers. 


Chapter VIII 


SOMETHING ABOUT “SLANG” 

W E MAY think of a language as a city. 

The words are the inhabitants. Each 
person in a city has certain business and habits 
which he follows daily. So each word has its 
particular work and habits. 

Just as in every large city there are always 
visitors passing through, so a language has some 
words and phrases that are not a permanent 
part of it. 

Sometimes they are high-class foreign visitors 
who stay a while and then depart. For instance, 
the French phrase fin de siecle, meaning “end 
of the century,” was very popular in this coun¬ 
try during the 1890’s. But it did not stay and 
take out citizenship papers; for when the new 
century began it fell into disuse. On the other 
hand, chauffeur, garage, lingerie, dachshund , 


What are 
“visiting” 
words? 


89 


90 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What are 
colloquialisms? 


canyon, piano, and almost countless other for¬ 
eign words have become good naturalized citi¬ 
zens of this great language-city. 

But not all of the visiting population of the 
city are high-class foreigners. In fact, most of 
them are native-born. These are called collo¬ 
quialisms, which means words or phrases that 
are heard in common speech but are not used in 
literary language. 

Some of these words finally get admitted into 
the society of our best words, but others remain 
more or less outcast. Many do not remain in 
the city very long. For instance, shilly-shally, 
a word expressing the idea of hesitation and 
springing from the question “shall I?,” has been 
taken into good language company. But nin¬ 
compoop, which comes from the Latin phrase 
non compos mentis, meaning “not of sound 
mind,” is still a colloquialism. 

Then, too, just as every large city has a float¬ 
ing population of tramps, so has a language. 
The tramps are called “slang.” This part of 
a language is always changing. A few such 


SOMETHING ABOUT “SLANG” 91 

words, however, find homes for themselves in 
the city, and, shedding their former bad asso¬ 
ciations, settle down and become useful and re¬ 
spected citizens. 

We often find that a slang word that is now 
a tramp had at one time a definite, useful job, 
but has run away from it and now does any 
odd job that takes its fancy. Such a word may 
still be respected when it goes back to its right¬ 
ful work, but it often loses its power to do its 
old work well. 

Take the word hectic , for example. This 
word has taken up with a loose life. It is used 
to describe anything that is “hurried” or “fever¬ 
ishly exciting.” Its real work was to mean 
“characterized by a wasting of the body; con¬ 
sumptive.” Its true meaning, except in medical 
usage among doctors, is now practically lost. 

Such words are frequently robbers as well. 
For instance, the word cute, which is a short¬ 
ened form of acute , rightfully means, “clever,” 
“shrewd,” or “sharp.” In colloquial use in the 
United States it has come to mean “bright” or 


Are slang 
words harmful 
to language? 


92 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What happens 
if slang is 
used too much? 


“attractive.” It has thrown out a number of 
more honest adjectives in some people’s speech. 
Perhaps you may hear someone even say, 
“What a cute sunset!” Of course, the word has 
no right at all to be in such a place as that. 

If such tramp words as cute, swell, nifty, 
slic\, \een, grand, and the like were allowed 
to do as they liked, there would soon be very 
few good adjectives left, and our language 
would become poverty-stricken in this respect. 
But fortunately there is no danger of this. The 
slang of one year or generation is often gone 
in the next, and a new crop takes its place. The 
language is not, as a whole, much affected by it. 
The slang of our grandfathers’ day now makes 
us smile, because it sounds so quaint and old- 
fashioned. 

As we have already noticed, some slang words 
finally settle down, mind their own business, 
and do a certain kind of work so well that 
they end by becoming respected citizens. A 
number of good English words have come up 
from the slums of slang in this way. 


SOMETHING ABOUT “SLANG’ 


93 


Grit, as a term denoting “personal courage,” 
has become a very good word. Bun\, meaning 
“deceit” or “sham,” is not yet quite out of the 
slang class; but buncombe, from which it 
comes, has been a good word for many years. 
Chum, a word for “an intimate companion,” 
has moved up out of slang; pal, while still slang, 
may before long follow it; but buddy is more 
doubtful. 

Much of our slang comes from the practice 
of using technical terms to express general 
meanings. For instance, start in, meaning “be¬ 
gin,” is lumber-camp talk and comes from 
starting into the woods to begin logging work. 
To tie on the feed-bag is a perfectly correct way 
to describe the feeding of a horse. Applied to 
human beings, it is just as coarse and rude as 
wearing clothes smelling of the stable into a 
friend’s dining-room would be. Such phrases 
become slang by being used in the wrong place. 
The intention may be to give an effect of hu¬ 
mor, but it is not always funny. 

Slang becomes popular because of some very 


Does slang 
ever become 
good English? 


94 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What is 

figurative 

language? 


deep-rooted speech habits. Sometimes, as we 
have just seen, there is the attempt to be humor¬ 
ous. Again, there may be the selfish pleasure 
of using terms that are puzzling at first to most 
people. These, however, are not the most com¬ 
mon reasons for the use of slang. People adopt 
slang words from love of novelty or by catch¬ 
ing a passing fashion. 

In studying the earliest writings of a people, 
we generally find that their literature takes the 
form of poetry. The appeal of poetry is very 
deep indeed. Poetry, in fact, was used before 
writing became known, because speech that 
moves in rhythm is easier to memorize. 

In poetry much use is made of figurative lan¬ 
guage, in which one thing is spoken of as some¬ 
thing else. For instance, in Beowulf, a famous 
Anglo-Saxon poem, the sea is called “the whale- 
road,” “the swan-road,” and “the water-street.” 
A boat is “a wave-rider,” “a floater,” or “the 
sea-wood.” 

Turn to the sport page of an American news¬ 
paper, and you will find the same kind of poetic 


SOMETHING ABOUT “SLANG’ 


95 


words in abundance. A football becomes “the 
pigskin” or “the oval.” A football field is “the 
gridiron.” Teams are referred to by the name 
of their coach, of the colors of the school, of the 
school mascot, or even of an industry. So we 
have “the Yostmen,” “the Purple,” “the Badg¬ 
ers,” and “the Boilermakers.” 

The effect of all this is slang. Strictly speak¬ 
ing, however, it is a poetic way of describing 
things, and is known as metonymy, which 
means the calling of a thing by the name of 
something that it resembles or suggests or that 
is connected with it, rather than by its own 
name. 

Many words used in the United States may 
be traced to the time when they were first used 
in early America. The first settlers saw and 
heard new things which they had known noth¬ 
ing about in England. In trying to express 
themselves they had to make new words. If 
it was a good word, which everyone was soon 
using, it gradually became a part of the lan- £ 
guage, and then was not thought of as slang. 


American newspapers contain 
many figurative words 


How does a 
newspaper use 
poetic words? 




96 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What gives slang 
its bad 
reputation? 


They were words which were needed to express 
something new. For instance, the Pilgrim 
Fathers drew lots in order to divide the land, 
and each share became known as a lot . Today 
we still use lot meaning a piece of land. Thus 
words have been added to the English tongue 
in America that are not used, at least in the 
same way, in other countries where English is 
spoken, although eventually they may be taken 
into the language there. It is for this reason 
that Sir William A. Craigie, a noted English 
scholar now a professor at the University of 
Chicago, where he is working on a new Ameri¬ 
can dictionary, says that Americans speak 
American and not English. 

Slang has a bad reputation because it so often 
abuses its rights. But slang and colloquial words 
are natural in a live language. They are often 
very useful in their place, to give vigor to spoken 
remarks. Nearly always, however, they have 
no place in writing, nor even in speech when 
we should be serious in our tone. 


Chapter IX 


THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 
lNGUAGE may change slowly or rapidly. 



In countries where there is little change, 
and life runs smoothly, language continues 
much the same for long periods. In Iceland, 
for instance, a remote island whose people have 
been to a large extent cut off from the rest of 
the world, the language has changed but little 
in nearly a thousand years. But in times of 
war and confusion, or of changing social condi¬ 
tions, language is likely to change very fast. 

We have seen how in the history of English, 
with repeated invasions of the island and shifts 
in the population, together with frequent wars, 
great changes in the life of the people, and much 
increase of knowledge, the language has 
changed rather rapidly. Can we foretell what 
is going to happen to our language? 


When is language 
lively to change 
rapidly? 


97 


98 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Do we need 
similar languages 
today? 


In early times, language varied almost from 
village to village, and hundreds of dialects some¬ 
times flourished within the bounds of a single 
small country. In those days, too, roads were 
bad, and people traveled little. There was no 
need for people to have exactly the same speech 
as people of other districts than their own, or 
to understand the language of other countries. 

But in our day good highways, swift auto¬ 
mobiles and busses, fast trains and steamships, 
and even airplanes, are making it possible for 
people to travel great distances in a short time. 
Thus we hear not only the speech of our own 
community but that of many other communi¬ 
ties. The radio, too, brings widely scattered 
communities together. Thus the little differ¬ 
ences that go to break a language into various 
dialects are continually being sandpapered 
down by rubbing together. 

There have been other influences at work 
to wipe out local peculiarities of speech. In 
the Middle Ages practically no one could read 
but the priests and the monks, and they read 


THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


99 


mostly Latin. Now, almost everyone not only 
can but does read every day. This is the age 
of print. Our daily papers have tremendous cir¬ 
culations. Thousands of magazines flourish, 
and more books are being published than ever 
before in the history of the world. And our 
everyday speech naturally is affected by what, 
we read in these publications. 

As distances are made less noticeable by our 
swift modern means of travel, the need for a 
language understood over great spaces increases. 
The tendency of the future will doubtless be 
toward fewer languages, understood by more 
people. It is barely possible that, at some time 
in the distant future, one language may become 
more and more widely spoken until all man¬ 
kind joins in using the same speech. 

Various attempts have been made to build 
artificial world-languages, but they have not met 
with the success that some of their enthusiastic 
friends expected of them. One, however, called 
Esperanto, has many followers, and a number 
of books have been printed in it. It is a sort of 


Does reading 
tend to do this? 


What is 
Esperanto? 


100 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


Should a 
language have 
stability? 


much-simplified combination of different Euro¬ 
pean languages. 

The more widely the habit of reading spreads, 
and the more that people listen to the same lan¬ 
guage used over the radio and in the “talkies,” 
the less variation there will be in the speech of 
those speaking the same language. With these 
strong influences working to make language 
uniform, it will be but natural for language to 
become more stable in time as well as in space. 
In other words, changes in a language will 
come more slowly. 

The stability of a language has certain advan¬ 
tages. The more rapidly a language changes, 
the more are the people cut off from the culture 
and traditions of their past. Surely it would 
be a loss if our language began to change so 
greatly that only special scholars could under¬ 
stand Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and 
other poets who are the glory of English 
literature. 

As we have seen, Chaucer, the first great 
English poet, wrote only about five hundred 


THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


101 


years ago; yet the language has changed so 
greatly since his time that now only experts can 
read The Canterbury Tales with ease and 
natural enjoyment. And it is only a little more 
than three centuries since Shakespeare died; 
but his plays already contain many words that 
have gone out of use or that have changed in 
meaning since then. 

But the greater changes in a language take 
place so slowly that we cannot see the motion 
even when we know that it is going on. It 
is, therefore, almost impossible to tell in just 
what direction a language is moving. Only by 
looking far back into its history can we deter¬ 
mine some of the chief trends of its change, 
as a man crossing a wide stretch of snow or sand 
can, only by looking back, see whether he has 
been walking in a straight line or in a circle. 

The scholars who have studied the history 
of the Indo-European languages, as far back 
as it is possible to go, have discovered a few such 
trends. On the whole, these trends seem to 
be making the languages easier to learn and 


Does language 
tend to become 
simpler? 


102 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How has the 
verb “had” 
changed? 


to speak, without lessening their power as a 
means of expression. 

If we go as far back as the fourth century 
since Christ, and look at Gothic, an East Ger¬ 
manic tongue that has left written records, we 
find that its verbs were most complex. Our 
little three-letter word had, the past tense of the 
verb have , did not exist in Gothic. But for fif¬ 
teen different ways that we use had , the Goths 
used fifteen different words. The shortest of 
these was seven letters long, and the longest had 
twelve letters. 

Anglo-Saxon bettered this condition by re¬ 
ducing the fifteen words to six, and their lengths 
to only six or eight letters. The English of 
Chaucer’s time made things still simpler by 
making the six words still shorter and easier to 
say. Modern English has reduced all six to the 
simple little word had. Where the Goths said 
habaidedum , the Anglo-Saxons said haejdon , 
the English of the Middle Ages said hadde or 
hadden , we make it simply had. 

The changes in the form of nouns, called 



a 


Many changes have been going on in the 

Romance languages 




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THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


105 


inflection, also have been much simplified. Ex¬ 
cept for the difference between the singular and 
the plural, the only change that we now make 
in the form of our nouns is to show possession; 
as, “the boy’s hat.” Even this change is limited 
mostly to persons and animals. We say “the 
wall of the house,” rather than “the house’s 
wall.” 

The tendency, then, is toward shorter, un¬ 
changing words. We no longer tell the rela¬ 
tionship of a word to the other words in a sen¬ 
tence by its ending. This relationship is now 
shown by the order of the words in the sen¬ 
tence, and the grammatical character of the 
words themselves. 

Similar changes have been going on in the 
Romance languages. Latin, in evolving into 
French, Spanish, Italian, and other modern 
forms, has become greatly simplified. In Latin, 
the noun changes were very numerous. The 
word for “boy,” for instance, was puer\ “of the 
boy” was pueri , “to the boy” was puero , and so 
on. Such changes have now disappeared al- 


Do other 
languages 
change, too? 


106 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


What other 
words have 
become simpler? 


together, with the exception of a difference be¬ 
tween the singular and the plural, in French, 
Spanish, and Italian. These languages do not 
even have a possessive form, as in English. In 
French, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” becomes “La 
Case de l’Oncle Tom” (The Cabin of the Uncle 
Tom). 

The same thing has been going on in Greek. 
Ancient Greek had several verb and noun forms 
that have disappeared from the spoken lan¬ 
guage of today. Other kinds of words, too, 
have become simpler. 

In English a few nouns, such as sheep and 
deer, have the same form both in the singular 
and in the plural. All other words have a 
special form for the plural. Occasionally, the 
plural is formed in a special way, as in man and 
men, mouse and mice, goose and geese, child 
and children, ox and oxen, but usually it is 
formed by adding s or es. 

The little words called pronouns still have 
special forms for use in different senses, such 
as I, me, my; he, him, his, and so on. But there 


THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


107 


are few pronouns and it is easy to remember the 
different forms. And even the pronouns are 
getting simpler. A few hundred years ago, 
thou, thee, and thine were used in speaking to 
one person. The pronouns ye, you, and your 
were used in speaking to more than one person. 
Now we have dropped thou, thee, and thine, 
except in poetry and prayer, and we have also 
dropped ye. Today the only pronouns that we 
use in speaking to one person or to several are 
you and yours . 

Our adjectives have only one form, as in 
“a good man,” “good men,” “a good woman,” 
“good women,” though in French and other 
languages the adjectives still have separate forms 
for masculine and feminine, singular and 
plural. 

A foreigner learning English is usually both¬ 
ered by the lack of regularity in our spelling. 
These irregularities are also very troublesome 
to school children whose native language is 
English, and sometimes they are annoying even 
to the children’s elders. Our spelling simply 


How have 
pronouns 
changed? 


108 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 



How has English 
become rich 
in words? 


has not kept pace with the changes in pronun¬ 
ciation. As we have seen, the language has 
changed a great deal, but many words are still 
written in the old-fashioned spelling, because 
people formed the habit of spelling them in 
that way. But even spelling has changed to 
some extent, as you will see at once if you read 
a few pages of a book printed three hundred 
years ago. An effort is now being made to sim¬ 
plify the spelling of a number of words; many 
people now write “tho” for “though,” “thru” 
for “through,” and “thot” for “thought.” Most 
people, however, still cling to the older spelling. 

The English language has gathered a rich 
harvest of words from many sources. For ex¬ 
ample, if we should wish to describe a storm, 
there are many names for it from which we 
may make our choice. Storm itself, as well as 
wind and blast, comes from the Anglo-Saxon. 
French has contributed tempest and breeze. 
From the Danish we have the word gale, and 
from the Icelandic gust. Cyclone comes from 
the Greek. Typhoon was brought from the 


We have many 
words that will 
describe a storm 




THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


109 


South Seas by the Portuguese. The Spanish 
gave us tornado , as well as hurricane , the lat¬ 
ter coming originally from the Caribbean. 
Whirlwind is a combination of whirl, which 
came into early English from the Scandinavian, 
and the Anglo-Saxon wind. Blizzard is a word 
of recent origin in the American Middle West. 

English has one very great advantage which 
we who are most familiar with it often do not 
fully appreciate. In many languages of the 
Indo-European family there is an elaborate 
system of gender. Latin has three genders: 
masculine, feminine, and neuter. In French, 
there are only two genders: masculine and fem¬ 
inine. But one must remember the gender of 
every single noun in order to use the right form 
of article (like our the, a, and an) and the right 
form of adjective with it. 

In French, the words for “the door,” “the 
window,” “the chair,” and “the table” (la porte, 
la jenetre, la chaise, and la table), for instance, 
are feminine, while the words for “the bed,” 
“the rug,” “the floor,” and “the wall” (le lit, 


What is one 
great advantage 
Tinglish has? 


110 


THE TONGUES OF MAN 


How else is 

English 

simplified? 


le tapis, le plancher, and le mur) are masculine. 
In French there is no word for it; everything 
is spoken of as he or she . In English we have 
no artificial genders to remember, although 
sometimes we like to speak of a ship as she, or 
the sun as he. But this use is limited mostly 
to poetry and is confined to a very few words. 

In English, too, the definite article the is the 
same before all words, both masculine and fem¬ 
inine, singular and plural. And the indefinite 
article, a, changes to an only before words be¬ 
ginning with a vowel sound, to make the pro¬ 
nunciation easier. 

German and some other modern European 
languages have three genders, like Latin. This 
seems very awkward to us, especially since sex 
and gender do not always agree. For example, 
in German, das Mddchen (the girl) is not fem¬ 
inine; it is neuter. 

English is a vigorous language and a progres¬ 
sive one. It is a democratic language which 
has not scorned to enrich itself with words and 
phrases from all parts of the world. The great 


THE SPEECH OF TOMORROW 


111 


wealth that it has thus gathered it has molded 
to its own style and uses. 

In the course of a few centuries, English has 
spread far beyond its original home. It has be¬ 
come one of the group of the world’s outstand¬ 
ing languages, others of which are French, 
Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Malay- 
Polynesian. 

Today English faces the future, a language 
with a long and checkered history, yet full of 
life and youthful spirit. It is spoken by ever- 
increasing millions, and its progressiveness, 
richness of expression, and simplicity of struc¬ 
ture will doubtless bring it, in the years that lie 
ahead, to an even more important position in 
the speech of the world. 


Is English a 
powerful 
tongue? 














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